Hot Turkey

The first part of this trip has been in Dalyan, a small Turkish holiday town. We stayed in one of the messy jumble of small pensions hugging the curve of a fat river, the tourism here is low-rise - not chic but there are no chain outlets here either. The bulk of the foreign tourists have gone and the holiday-makers are mostly Turkish now.

The popular thing to do is hop on one of the boats going to the coast, whole families come along on these trips, the men take my husband aside and try and teach him something about fishing while the women get out their purses and, through sheer force of will, make me understand their family history illustrated with the bundles of photographs they always have with them. A ten-year-old from Istanbul with frighteningly good English helped with some translation and, hearing that I had not eaten well the night before, has drawn me up a list of what I must eat and the places I must visit when I get to her city. The image here is one side of several pages of instructions, you might need to click on it if you want to read it.

The Director has now gone to America to attend another film festival and I’m going to go and look at some other bits of Turkey on my own. Lone travelling always gets a bit more extreme and I’ve had some awful times doing it as well as some really good ones, if I can get a connection I’ll tell you about it...